One of my biggest concerns was gettin the trivet out of the mold. I was releaved of this fear today as it came out VERY easily. It’s hard to see…but the trivet steel was embedded into the melamine and i figured it would have taken a lot of prying to get it out straight. I ended up shoving a bunch of Vasoline into the groves so the cement wouldn’t cause the melamine board to swell…as well as a lubricant to get it out. Worked very well :tup:
total aftethought…i have one too. In my mind was just planning to use it when i wet grind, will definently be using the shroud on the other pieces.
just a quick update. I flipped over the two largest pieces today… a bit heavy. For the most part everything turned out as expected. Will need some work to make near-perfect. In the mean time…the polishing phase begins.
I can’t believe how smooth the section with the acrylic looked right out of the mold. Do you think that maybe you could have make more parts of the mold out of acrylic sheets to save on the polishing time?
yeah, it will take the exact surface finish as what’s used for a mold. I could have done an entire acrylic mold, but the biggest “problem” is you still have to polish grind the surface if you want to expose some of the aggregate. If you’re looking for that monotoned surface finish and color right out of the mold…then yes you can do that to save polishing time.
got a chance to do some grinding tonight. It’s a wet mess…really glad i’m not doing this in my garage.
I’ve been playing around with how much grinding i actually want to do and determine how much aggregate to expose. I decided to keep it sublte at this point and expose minimal aggregate.
I used a 50grit, 100grit, 200grit, 400grit and 800grit so far in this pic.
here i did 1500grit and 3000grit. It’s still wet and dirty…so the full shine isn’t there yet. it should really come to life when it’s waxed and polished.
used the grinder to put a chamfer on the edges.
to be honest, i’m not happy with the color when its wet. I wanted it whiter. When it dries it’s lighter…but still not as light as i would have wanted it. Lesson learned. If i were to do it again, i’d add a lot more White Portland Cement to the mix.
I’m debating about possibly staining it at this point…but i need to get a better feel for what they will look like when the wet grinding/polishing is done.
